If the player captured a specific village near Kyiv and had Von Teuffel in their party, the game would trigger a cutscene. The Iron Priest would announce that the Clockwork Legion had "perfected the volatile agent." A small box would appear in the player's inventory: "Von Teuffel's Last Key."
The mod was dead. Long live the mod.
The forums turned. "Volkov is lazy." "The mod is unbalanced." "Fix the siege AI, you hack."
For a year, nothing. Then a teenager in Belarus found the source code. He fixed the memory leak. He rebalanced the grenadiers. He added voice lines—actual recorded voice lines—for the Iron Priest. He renamed it "Clockwork Legion: Reloaded."
The premise was absurd. A rogue Swedish engineer, exiled for heresy, had fled to the wilds of Zaporizhia. There, he built a mercenary company powered not by faith or gold, but by clockwork mechanisms and experimental black powder. Their muskets could fire three rounds a minute. Their grenadiers carried fused clay spheres. Their "Iron Priest" rode a steam-driven cart that doubled as a mobile field gun.
I smiled. Then I saved the game, closed the laptop, and went to make dinner.
The first comment was: "Crash on startup. Fix your pathfinding, moron."
I uploaded the mod on a rainy Tuesday in November.